The monitor lit up at the check-in, a pink, triangular face on it. George, or Jeffrey, the front desk kid. He looked worried.
“Mr. Whales?”
“Ah… How are you, buddy?”
“Yes. I just wanted to let you know that two draft marshals have stopped by to see you.” I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, trying at the same time to cast a confused expression over my face.
“Did you say ‘draft marshals’?”
“Yes, sir. I assured them there must have been a mistake, but they insisted on seeing you.”
“Did they say when they would be back?”
“Uh, well, no. They’re waiting inside your apartment.”
“What?”
“That’s right, Mr. Whales. We weren’t supposed to tell you, but Mr. George felt it was the least we could do.”
“Did they have a warrant?”
“Of course, sir. We would never have let them in without it. ”
“All right. I’ll go up and see them… Jeffrey. Can’t argue with the government.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“And tell Mr. George I appreciate the warning.”
The monitor darkened, and the striped black-and-yellow arm rose up to the ceiling, like a guillotine blade. Letting go of the brakes, I numbly allowed the car to roll inside. It rolled down a level and into a double space marked “7805.” I pushed the button to set the roof in place. I turned off the engine and remained seated. Just like that the draft was back, making everything else seem distant, trivial. The recent promise to stop by Dr. Wright’s office was erased from my memory. Jennifer returned to the shelf of uncorrectable mistakes. The triple-layered ski hat faded like a pleasant dream.
Five minutes later I climbed out, locked the door, patted the hood and headed for the elevator. It dropped me off on the seventy-eighth floor, where I was picked up by the not-long-enough curving hallway and delivered to the dead end of my door. I pressed my thumb into the keyhole. The lock clicked. Cautiously, I stepped inside.
The hallway greeted me with dead silence, and then suddenly the phone started ringing like crazy. I almost had a heart attack. When the palpitations subsided, I was ready to cooperate with the officials, who would react to the door and the phone, but there was still no sound of movement. I let the phone ring until I could stand it no longer.
“Listen, I’m not going to try anything, so you don’t have to ambush me.”
No answer.
“I’m going to answer it! Just letting you know.”
Nothing.
With a shrug I said, “Phone. Pick up.”
Jimbo’s face appeared on the door display. A flicker of hope came and went.
“Luke, what the hell are you doing dressed?” he hissed.
“Tell me good news, pal.”
“You need to give us more time. We have the best in the business working on it.”
“More time? Jim, draft marshals have already come for me.”
“What? Already? How did you get rid of them?”
“I didn’t. In fact, I was sure they were waiting for me here.”
“So you went out?”
“Yes, I went out.”
“Didn’t I tell you—?”
“Not now, Jim.”
“Fine. So where are the marshals?”
“Beats me. I’m half-expecting them to pounce on me the second I step inside the living room.”
“What?”
“Jimbo, I don’t know what. I walk in, expecting to be handcuffed and hauled off to some boot camp. Instead, I find your pretty face on the phone and possibly a couple of deaf, mute and armed draft marshals hiding in my bedroom. You tell me what.”
“Well, let’s assume they don’t hire deaf and mute people to be draft marshals, old sport. That would mean, if you’re completely certain the cops have been there before, that they left. And that would, in turn, mean, the people who are trying to save your ass from Uncle Sam have more time to do their job. Now. Go take a nice shower, take your pill, shave and stay put. Does that sound like something you can make happen?”
“Are you done patronizing me? I’m under a lot of stress here.”
“He’s under stress,” Jimbo inhaled. Then it occurred to me.
“Hey, Jimbo, how do you know about my pills?”
“What?”
“You said just now, ‘Take your pill.’”
“Shit, old sport.” He waved a hand at me. “Everybody knows. Wait for my call, all right? Until then, cooperate with authorities.”
The screen went dark.
Everybody knows? How the hell do they? But it was the case of trying to stuff too many gum-sticks in your mouth at the same time. Pushing the question out of my mind, I locked the door and opened the closet. At that moment I became aware of two things: the smell of coffee and the buzz of the Auto-Vac coming from the kitchen.
So the law enforcers helped themselves to my twenty-dollars-per-pound coffee and made a mess. Slamming the closet door shut, I marched to the kitchen…
…Where I must have blacked out for a second. When light returned to my eyes, I saw that propped against the cabinet under the sink sat, staring right at me in surprise, a bulky, bald and completely dead man in a suit. In the middle of the man’s chest, where the coat had fallen open, there were two black bottomless holes framed in crimson. An empty cup of coffee lay on its side by his shoe. Another cup was on the table, half-full. My poor Auto-Vac buzzed with dumb, determined and fruitless effort to push the body out of the way, so that it could clean and incinerate a small pool of blood that had accumulated between the man’s back and the cabinet’s doors.
* * *
First I screamed. A pitiful, abrupt, desperate squeak. I took a step toward the body and immediately several away from it. Looking everywhere at once, I ran. In the living room the TV pulsed on, and I wanted to scream again, but only managed to freeze in the middle, grabbing my head in both hands.
This was Munch’s painting. The real “Scream” had no sound. What the crazy Norwegian had captured on canvas was not the act of screaming, but the need, the desire to scream. When you’ve just seen something you wouldn’t have been prepared to deal with even in a normal state, and you are far from normal, because you may have missed a few days of your depression treatment, and the day hasn‘t exactly been salubrious up to that point. When you’re so terrified that your lungs collapse and the vocal cords tighten around your Adam’s apple and you squeeze your temples in a desperate effort to prevent a capillary from exploding inside your brain. When you want nothing more than to scream, but no sound comes. And all you can do is beg for monsters to go away and although they don‘t, if you’re strong, or thick-skinned, or just lucky, the oxygen will reenter your parched mouth in a moment or two and you will live.
I was lucky.
But as soon as I was able to interact with myself, I realized that the pills I’d been taking were not simple antidepressants.
I must be schizophrenic, I thought feverishly. That’s why the medicine had no name. That’s why it all seems so real. They all knew about it, but never told me the real diagnosis. They humanely drugged and supervised me for five years and since I was making a fortune on TV and had no lapses and the medicine seemed to work so well and I got used to taking the pills as if it were brushing my teeth in the morning their guard slackened and they left me alone one ugly Wednesday and the first thing my wrecked and suddenly freed brain ordered was to toss the bottle out of the window so that it could take the gracious host out for a thrill ride. And none of today happened. I probably did not get out of bed yet. Probably, I am still under the covers, staring up at the ceiling. The doc, Jimbo, Jennifer — they’re all in on it. Shit, old sport. Everybody knows.
Maybe they did it on purpose. To ruin me. To have me locked up. Maybe Jennifer left so that she and Jimbo could…
The surroundings were becoming blurry. I imagined it felt like the cabin of a plane that’s losing pressure.
Suddenly,
I was mortally afraid of passing out there. If this is inside my brain, a thought came, then it doesn’t matter whether I stay or go, but if it is, in fact, somehow, real…
I rushed to the bedroom closet and pulled out my cash cards. Stuffing them in my pocket, I changed into a brown fur-lined bomber jacket, slapped on the ski hat and rushed back out. Then, remembering that it wasn’t the cash or the hat I had meant to search for, I, gripped by another fit of panic, moaned and ran back to the closet again, rummaging through boxes on the top shelf.
Finally I found it.
I ripped out a small wooden chest and threw it on the bed, kneeling in front of it. I opened the lid. I saw the shape, stamped into red velvet, but the shape only. The gun was gone.
I tried to break the chest with my forehead. When that failed, I, with a titanic push, rose to my feet. The door to my beautiful condo closed behind me with a profound hiss.
Not the front lobby, I thought, keeping the elevator button pressed until it arrived. Not the car. The marina exit, then.
With the boating season over, the long, red-carpeted tunnel to the marina was empty and sparingly illuminated. Inside the hangar-like, steel-roofed structure the water was black. A lone sailboat swayed anchored on the far right. I turned my back to it, mounted two flights of stairs up to the ground level and climbed over a locked gate. Another minute, and I emerged on the lakeshore path.
When steady, cold breeze from the brown lake hit me in the face, I pretty much gave up the hope of waking up. The beach lay clean and desolate; the lakeshore path crawled with people. A few remaining boats, every single one with an American flag and some with ribbons, jumped up and down on the waves. Turning north, I tried to recall where I was going and failed, but went anyway.
The image of the staring dead man would not let me go. Images, actually. I discovered that the corpse wasn’t as deeply and permanently imprinted in my memory as I’d expected. Even though mere minutes had passed, I wasn’t sure now whether he slumped to the left or to the right, whether one of his legs was bent at the knee or both, what color his tie was and so on, so the scene in my mind shifted constantly around the immovable holes in the man’s chest.
The fact that I couldn’t remember something so shocking and so recent unnerved me. Fingers spread, I snapped my hands up to my face, terrified and half-expecting to find them covered with blood. They were clean, and I stuffed them back in my pockets. An instant later they were out again, and I frisked myself, pretending to smooth the clothes. Nothing. Embarrassment. Relief.
My phone began to ring. Without thinking, I pitched it in the water, attracting more glances from potential witnesses, most of whom were doubtlessly already finding my hunched figure familiar. I hastened my step, grumbling.
“What are you doing?” I muttered. “You should have stayed home and called the police and called Jimbo. Running is admitting guilt. And throwing the phone out is just stupid. Stupid, stupid. You should have called Jeffrey who would confirm you weren’t home until the last moment. There’s no gun; you had no time to get rid of it…”
Exactly. No time to get rid of it. The gun is there. It might be in the kitchen drawer, or under my mattress, or somewhere else I would not be able to find it before the cops showed up. Or it could be on top of the desk, begging to be grabbed…
My feet kept moving.
The next thought hit me like a lightning bolt. I missed a step and almost knocked over some mustached fellow on a bicycle. I apologized and forgot him. There were two marshals, the thought was. Jeffrey said there were two.
Cops were going to think I either took the other one hostage, or killed him too and hid the body, or, better yet, that I cut him into little pieces and fed those to my Auto-Vac for incineration or something.
But I didn’t. And if that other marshal was alive, he knew it. All I had to do now was find him in a city of fifteen million people.
Chapter Two
In a study with oddly slanted walls a tall, black-haired man stood facing a two-story-high triangular window. In his left hand the man held a vintage black revolver. With a thick cloth in his right he polished the gun’s barrel.
“Did he run?” the man suddenly asked, drawing a smirk from a woman who had just then walked in, very quietly, into the room.
“He ran.”
“Of course he did.”
“He will run back any minute now.”
“It has already been taken care of.” At that the woman bit her lip. The man turned around.
“What? Are you a big fan?”
“Shut the hell up,” the woman said and left. Grinning, the man returned to polishing the gun.
It hadn’t rained in two months. The surf was rising, although the clouds would not appear for another hour or so. Watching the storm coming, the man was amused by the excitement growing steadily within him. Finally, it is beginning, he thought, conscious of his usage of a meaningless adverb.
“At last!” He said pompously and laughed.
Chapter Three
I walked until my legs began to hurt, which did not take long, in terms of distance at least. I kept fit for the suits, but treadmills were never my thing.
I found myself on a bench on the edge of a concrete circle, where behind the erect and gallant Hamilton, subtle Goethe crouched, glancing across the avenue at an antique domed construction with columns. There were less people than cars there, and cars were anonymous, but the desired peace never came.
While I had trudged along the cold lake, I was focusing on moving my feet and avoiding eye contact. A simple task I could cope with. Now though, my solitude and immobility allowed my mind the opportunity to fully grasp the events of that day. The result was rather predictable.
Shortly, I was mumbling “I am Revenge; sent from th’infernal kingdom/To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind/By working wreakful vengeance on thy foes” over and over again. Something cheerful I remembered from my student days. I also might have had some saliva dripping out of the corner of my mouth. So when I heard the sounds of hoofs on the pavement, I imagined they belonged to horseback police, and my heart rejoiced at this chance to confess, repent and give myself over to the authorities, who would provide necessary medical attention. Smiling, I removed my hands from my eyes.
First there was nothing but bright, painful light. The sun, which had lingered on top of the dome across the street in order to blind me, was slowly withering away. Shielding myself from it, I turned this way and that, searching for the horses. Then I shrank back in surprise. Not ten feet away, right in front of me, stood a young woman. Short black hair framed her face, which, I thought, possessed the tiniest hint of Asian descent. She was skinny, dressed in jeans, a short black cashmere jacket with big buttons, beginning of the century style, and high-heeled boots. My gaze hung dumbly over those heels.
“Were you here all this time?” I asked her.
“How long is that?” Her voice had a coarse note in it and I looked up at her face, reevaluating her age. Twenty-five, maybe older. She continued to stare at me. I could not remember the last time anyone had looked at me for that long without recognition. Either she did not watch the TV, which was a ridiculous idea, or my ski hat and beard disguised me better than I had hoped. Regardless, I knew what was going to happen next. Sitting with hands over eyes in a public place is basically asking for a 911 call. But it didn’t really matter. There was nowhere I could go, and I was tired.
“Please, go on, call the police,” I said.
“What for?”
“I’m afraid I’m a target of a nationwide manhunt in connection to draft-dodging, shooting of two marshals, and disposing of a body by way of dismembering it and depositing the chunks into an autonomic vacuum-cleaner for incineration.”
Her eyebrows rose in a way that made me think of someone faking amusement after their best friend had told an unfunny joke.
“Well, did you do any of it?” She inquired suddenly. I gaped at her. Then sighed.
“No.”
&nb
sp; “Why do you want to be caught, then?”
“I actually was trying to dodge the draft.”
“What, you don’t want to protect your country in some desert ten thousand miles away?” She chortled, dropped on the bench beside me and pulled out a pack of “American Spirit.” I stared. One had to be truly a hardcore smoker to continue buying cigarettes. Striking a match, she sucked the flame in and blew out a billow of smoke. “Mind if I sit down?” she asked, mistaking my startled look.
“I… I don’t think you can smoke here…”
“I thought you wanted to attract attention of the police. If none show up, then you don’t have to write your confession tonight.” Smoke trailed out of her nose as she spoke. She had a cute nose, thin and tiny and sharp.
“So what are you doing here?”
“Taking a walk.”
“Alone?” She didn’t answer that, only slanted her eyes in my direction. Instead, she asked her own question.
“What’s your name?” For a brief moment I had an unsettling thought that she was an apparition.
“Am I really that unrecognizable in person?”
She turned and squinted at me.
“In person? What are you, a movie star?”
“TV, actually. Though I’ve done a movie or two…”
“Oh.” A shrug!
“Name’s Luke,” I said finally, when it was clear she was not going to expand on that “oh.”
“I’m Iris.”
I found nothing to counter that, and we spent the next few minutes in silence. She finished her cigarette and threw it at Goethe. No cops showed up. I expected her to get up and leave then, but she just sat there. Silence began to pressure me.
“Listen, Iris,” I said, making it sound like a joke. “Since you won’t call the cops, may I use your phone? I threw mine into the lake.”
“Who are you going to call?”
“I’m hoping it will come to me when I have the dial in my hand. Look, I can pay you…”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
“I don’t do cell phones.”
Project Antichrist Page 2